He had spent nine years training a woman to doubt herself, and then he did the one thing that undid all his training in an afternoon: he showed her, past all possible doubt, that her worst suspicion had been true the whole time.

Chapter 20 — The Mountain Was Never Our Grave

Six months later, the summer sun lay warm and golden over the green valleys of Glacier National Park.

The snow was long gone, and the slopes that had nearly been my grave were covered instead in wildflowers, whole fields of them, blue and yellow and white under a clear high sky.

I went back.

I had thought carefully about whether I could, and then I decided that letting that mountain remain a place of terror would be one last thing Brandon had taken from me, and I was finished letting him take things.